Part one of this guide ended with a draft. This one starts there.

A finished draft is a bit like a packed suitcase: the hard decisions are made, but you can still leave without your passport. Plenty of good contributor articles stumble in this last stretch, with an AI edit that sanded away the author’s voice, a stock photo of two people shaking hands, or an author profile so bare we’re not sure who wrote the piece.

So this part covers the journey from draft to published: how to use AI without handing it the pen, how to pick an image that earns its place, what to expect once you hit submit, and how to make your article keep working for you after it’s live.

Using AI to help you write

AI can make the writing process faster. What it can’t supply is the thing that makes a contributor article worth reading: your experience, your judgement and your point of view.

The simplest rule: use AI to help you think and write better, not to think and write for you. You remain responsible for the story, the argument and every claim in the final draft.

Brainstorming topics

Not sure what to write about? AI can help you turn your experience into article ideas, but only if you give it something to work with.

Instead of asking: “Give me 10 startup article ideas.”

Try: “I am a fintech founder in Singapore. We recently expanded into Indonesia and learned several unexpected lessons about customer acquisition, regulation and hiring. Based on this experience, suggest 10 article ideas for the e27 Contributor Programme. Focus on specific insights that would be useful to other founders rather than promotional topics.”

The first prompt gets you ideas anyone could write. The second gets you ideas only you could write, which is exactly what we look for.

Once you have an idea, AI is also useful for pressure-testing it. Ask it to challenge your angle, narrow a broad topic or find the question your experience can answer. For example: “Here is my initial idea: [idea]. What are three stronger or more specific angles I could explore? For each, explain why it would be useful to startup founders or operators.”

AI can help you find the story. Deciding which story is worth telling is still your job.

Research

AI is good at helping you work out what you need to know. For example: “I’m writing about Southeast Asian startups expanding into Japan. What areas should I research to understand the opportunities and challenges? Give me a research checklist covering market size, customer behaviour, regulation, competition, funding and talent.”

You can also use it to spot gaps in your knowledge, summarise material you’ve gathered, compare perspectives and flag claims that need supporting evidence.

What it can’t be is your source. AI can produce information that is outdated, wrong or entirely made up, and it often sounds equally confident either way. If a statistic is going into your article, don’t ask an AI tool whether it’s true. Find the original report and check it yourself. More on this under “Fact-checking” below.

Creating an outline

Once you have your idea and research, AI can help shape them into a logical structure. The key is to give it your argument rather than asking it to invent one.

For example: “My article argues that Southeast Asian startups should rethink how they approach expansion. My three main points are [point 1], [point 2] and [point 3]. Help me create a logical article outline. Don’t add new arguments. Suggest where I could use examples, data or my own experience.”

A good outline will show you where your argument has gaps, where you’re repeating yourself and what belongs in each section. If AI starts adding points you don’t actually believe, take them out. The argument has to be yours.

Improving clarity and flow

Already written a draft? This is where AI earns its keep.

Instead of: “Rewrite this entire article to make it better.”

Try: “Review this article for clarity and flow. Highlight sentences that are confusing, repetitive or overly complicated. Suggest improvements, but preserve my meaning, tone and point of view.”

The second prompt keeps you in control. You get specific suggestions to accept or reject, rather than a new article that happens to share your topic.

Then watch for AI polish. Left to its own devices, AI tends to make writing more formal, more generic and more predictable. Phrases such as “in today’s rapidly evolving landscape”, “game-changer”, “unlocking new possibilities” and “revolutionising the industry” can make an article sound like it was assembled by a committee of robots. Our editors read a lot of drafts, and this is usually the first thing we notice.

If an edit makes your writing sound less like you, don’t use it.

Fact-checking

AI is not your fact-checker. It can help you find the claims that need checking, but the checking is yours to do.

A useful prompt: “Review this article and list every factual claim that should be independently verified before publication. Do not determine whether the claims are true. Just identify what needs checking.”

Then go through the list:

• Numbers and statistics: Where did the number come from? Is the source credible and current?
• Quotes: Did the person actually say this, and is it in context?
• Company information: Are funding amounts, founding dates and product details correct?
• Dates: Are events, launches and reports dated accurately?
• Claims and predictions: Have you separated facts from opinions and assumptions?
• Sources: Have you gone back to the original, rather than another article’s interpretation of it?

Getting a second opinion

Once your draft is finished, AI can act as a second pair of eyes. For example: “Act as an editor reviewing this contributor article for a technology publication. Identify the three strongest parts of the article and the three areas that need improvement. Focus on argument, clarity, specificity and reader value. Do not rewrite the article.”

You can also ask it to suggest stronger headlines, point out weak sections, tighten long paragraphs or check whether your conclusion actually follows from your argument.

Treat its suggestions the way you’d treat notes from a well-meaning colleague: useful, occasionally wrong and never final. You are the editor of your own article.

Where to draw the line

AI can help you brainstorm, organise, outline, critique and refine. It should never:

• Invent your experience, quotes, statistics or sources
• Write an article from generic information with nothing of your own in it
• Turn promotional material into something that looks independent
• Disguise copied or repackaged content
• Be treated as the final word on facts

Above all, don’t ask AI to write the whole article and submit the result unchanged. A contributor article should contain something you know, have experienced, believe or have learned. That’s the part no tool can supply, and it’s the part our readers come for.

Also Read: The e27 Contributor Programme: Writing an article that gets published — Part 1

Keeping your own voice

The strongest contributor articles sound like a specific person, not a generic industry voice. A few ways to protect yours:

• Read your draft out loud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d say to a colleague, it’s probably been smoothed into AI-speak somewhere along the way.
• Keep your quirks. Your sentence rhythm and the phrases you’d actually use are worth more than prose that’s merely cleaner.
• Rewrite the opening and conclusion yourself. If you leaned on AI for a first draft, these are the sections readers remember most, so they should sound most like you.
• Keep your uncertainty. Don’t let AI turn genuine nuance into false confidence. If you’re unsure about something, say so. It’s often what makes a piece feel real rather than templated.

---

Creating images

Your image is the first thing a reader sees, often before they’ve read a word of your headline. A good one helps them understand your article at a glance and makes them want to read on.

It doesn’t need to illustrate every detail in your headline. The best images usually capture the idea, mood or central theme of an article rather than simply showing its subject. Think of yours as the visual introduction to your story.

What works for contributor articles

The strongest images do one of three things: illustrate a concept from the piece, set a tone that matches the argument, or give the topic a relevant visual anchor, such as a chart, a map, a workspace or a product in use.

What works well:

• A clean, conceptual illustration tied to your core idea, such as an open padlock for a piece about removing a paywall, or a bridge for one about regional connectivity.
• A real photo of a place, event or setting mentioned in your article, such as a city skyline, a conference or an office.
• A simple chart or data visualisation if your article is built on data.

What doesn’t:

• Generic stock photos of people shaking hands, pointing at laptops or standing in front of whiteboards. They add nothing, and readers have seen the same handshake on a hundred unrelated articles.
• Images with visible text, logos or watermarks that you don’t have permission to use
• Anything overly literal or clichéd. A robot hand reaching for a human hand has illustrated more AI articles than anyone can count.

Size and format

Use a widescreen image in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The recommended size is 690 × 390 px, which keeps your image aligned with the article layout and ensures it displays properly across the platform.

If you’re generating an image with an AI tool, set it to widescreen from the start. Cropping a square image afterwards almost always cuts off something important.

Before uploading

Give your image a quick final check:

• Nothing important is cut off, and key visual elements aren’t too close to the edges
• It’s sharp and high enough quality to look clean on both desktop and mobile
• There’s no unnecessary text or watermark

---

Submitting your article

You’ve done the hard part. Submitting is the easy part, but a few small steps make the difference between an article that moves straight into review and one that sits waiting for missing details.

Step 1: Create your e27 profile

If you don’t have an e27 profile yet, you can sign up in a minute using your LinkedIn, Facebook or Google account. Once you’re in, don’t forget to verify your profile. It’s a quick step, but we can’t publish articles from unverified profiles, so it’s worth doing straight away.

Step 2: Complete your profile

Your profile is how readers know who wrote the article, so a complete profile is mandatory before any article can be published. Before you submit, make sure yours includes:

• A headline: your current role and organisation
• A bio: a few lines on who you are and what you work on
• A profile image
• Your location
• At least one social link, such as LinkedIn

It’s worth a few extra minutes. Your bio travels with every article you publish, and a good one is often what turns a curious reader into one who follows your work.

Step 3: Submit your article

When you’re ready, head to the Contributor Programme page and click “Start Writing”. From there, it’s refreshingly simple: paste in your article, add your tags and featured image, and hit submit.

Also Read: Write, connect, grow: What motivates us to run the e27 Contributor Programme

If someone is helping you submit

We know many contributors work with PR or communications teams, and that support is welcome. The one thing we do ask is that each article is submitted from the author’s own profile. It keeps every piece connected to a real person and makes sure the credit goes to the right name.

So if you’re helping an author, they’ll just need to do a one-time profile setup themselves. After that, they’re all set to submit.

Choosing your tags

Tags help the right readers find your article. Every contributor article is automatically tagged “Community”, and you can add up to four more from our verticals, five in total.

If you’re writing about how you use AI at work, for example, your tags might be Community, Artificial Intelligence and Productivity.

The best tags describe what your article is really about rather than every topic it brushes past. That way, readers browsing a vertical find exactly what they came for, and you find exactly the readers you wrote for.

Adding your featured image

You’ll find the option to upload your featured image in the text formatting toolbar, in the content body. If you’d like a quick refresher on size and format, the “Creating images” section above has you covered.

Originality and ownership

Your article is yours, and it stays yours. When you submit it to the Contributor Programme, you’re giving e27 a licence to use, edit and modify it, which is what lets us shape it for publication and share it with our readers.

One thing to keep in mind: once an article is published, we can’t remove it. So if anything still feels uncertain, whether a figure, a claim or a detail about your company, it’s well worth settling before you submit.

When you hit submit, you’re also letting us know that:

• It’s your own original work. The ideas, experience and argument are yours, even if AI helped along the way.
• Your images are credited. If your featured image or any visuals come from another source, a quick credit is all it takes.
• Your quotes and sources are genuine. Every quote can be traced back to a real source, and every statistic is cited accurately.

Contributor articles are published under your name and reflect your own views. That also means you’re responsible for what your article says, so make sure you’re comfortable standing behind every claim in it.

---

After you submit

Once you hit submit, your article is in our hands. Here’s what happens next, so you’re never left wondering where it’s got to.

What happens after submission

Your article goes straight to our Contributor Programme editorial team. We read every submission to make sure it fits our editorial guidelines and house style, the same standards covered throughout this guide. Once it’s ready, we add it to our publishing schedule.

You don’t need to keep checking in. We’ll send you an email as soon as your article has been scheduled.

Making corrections

Once an article is submitted, it can no longer be edited from your side. But don’t worry if you spot a typo or a figure that needs fixing. Just email us at writers@e27.co with the details, and we’ll take care of minor corrections for you.

If your article needs revisions

Sometimes an article is almost there but needs a little more work. If that’s the case, we’ll email you with our suggested revisions.

To resubmit, you’ll need to send it in as a fresh submission. Your previous version is removed from the system once revisions are requested, so make sure to work from your own saved copy of the draft.

If your article isn’t accepted

Not every article will be the right fit for the Contributor Programme, and that’s okay. If yours isn’t accepted, you’ll find the reasons on your content dashboard. Many contributors use that feedback to shape a stronger piece next time, and we’d always love to see what you come back with.

Publishing timelines

Most articles are published within seven to 10 working days of submission. Once yours is scheduled, you can see the exact publishing date and time on your content dashboard.

---

Promote your work and grow with e27

Publishing your article is a milestone, but it’s also a beginning. Here’s how to make the most of it, and of being part of the Contributor Programme.

Sharing your article

Nobody can share your article quite like you can. Your network already knows your work and trusts your perspective, which makes your own post one of the best ways to get your article in front of the right readers.

When your article goes live, share it on LinkedIn and anywhere else your peers spend time. A line or two on why you wrote it, or the one idea you most want readers to take away, usually lands better than the link on its own.

We’ll do our part too. Your article and company are highlighted across e27’s social media channels and in our daily digest newsletter, giving your work a second life with our wider audience.

Building your e27 author profile

Every article you publish is collected on your e27 author profile, so over time it becomes a living portfolio of your thinking. Keep your bio and headline up to date as your role changes, since readers often look you up after finishing an article they enjoyed. A strong profile turns a single read into a lasting connection.

Contributor Spotlights

Our Contributor Spotlight series features members of our community in more depth, giving readers a chance to get to know the person behind the byline.

Spotlights are chosen by our editorial team, based on factors such as how regularly you contribute and how your articles resonate with readers. If you’d like to be considered, you’re welcome to put yourself forward by writing to writers@e27.co. The final choice rests with our editors, but we always enjoy hearing from contributors who want to share more of their story.

Top contributors of the year

At the end of each year, we celebrate the contributors whose voices shaped the conversation through our top 27 contributors list. Our editors make the selection using similar factors to Contributor Spotlights, looking across your contributions over the whole year.

Contributor community activities

The Contributor Programme is more than a place to publish. Throughout the year, we run Writing Sprints: themed week-long challenges with daily prompts, designed to help you get ideas onto the page alongside fellow contributors. We also set monthly themes to spark fresh perspectives on the topics shaping our ecosystem.

We share everything, from sprint announcements to monthly themes, by email and through our WhatsApp community. Join us there to hear about new opportunities first.

Becoming a regular contributor

Some of our most-read voices started with a single article. Writing regularly helps you build a body of work that readers recognise, and the more you write, the more your profile and perspective grow with it.

If you’d like to make it a habit, you can also have your own column on e27. Your articles go out on a set day and time, weekly, fortnightly or monthly, so readers know when to expect you. To set one up, write to us at writers@e27.co and we’ll work out the details together.

Your next chapter

Here’s something most writing guides won’t admit: some of our strongest contributors would never call themselves writers. What they have is something worth sharing and the patience to show their working.

So write from what you know. Let AI carry the bags, not drive the car. Check your facts as if an editor is watching (one is). And keep enough of yourself in the draft that a reader could pick you out of a lineup.

Then hit submit. The worst that can happen is a few notes from us, and honestly, that’s where most good articles begin. When you’re ready for your next piece, we’ll be here to read it.

If you have a question at any stage, whether about your profile, your submission or anything in this guide, our FAQs cover most of the details. For anything else, write to us at writers@e27.co.

—

Ready to share your perspective? Submit your article via the Contributor Programme here.

The post The e27 Contributor Programme: Using AI, submitting, and growing your readership — Part 2 appeared first on e27.

Hong Kong does not make many batteries. It has no lithium mines, no gigafactories, and industrial land prices that would make any cell manufacturer wince. Yet Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) wants the city counted among Asia’s premier energy storage ecosystems, and it has now published a report saying so.

The inaugural Battery and Energy Storage (BES) Strategic Analysis Report, unveiled today at One Earth Summit 2026 by HKSTP CEO Terry Wong, is less a case for manufacturing muscle than for middleman value. It argues that Hong Kong’s strength lies in a four-stage value chain spanning research, systems integration, green finance and end-of-life battery management.

Also Read: Thirty climate tech startups in Southeast Asia that would rather build than pledge

It is a clever pitch. It is also a report written by the organisation that stands to benefit most from its conclusions, and it should be read that way.

The demand side is hard to argue with

The macro numbers are the least contentious part. According to the report, nearly 200 countries have pledged to expand renewables, with the goal of raising electricity’s share of global final energy demand from about 20 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2035. Electricity consumption from computing infrastructure is projected to more than double, from 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024 to 945 TWh by 2030. Investment in battery and storage technologies is expected to hit US$5 trillion (about HK$40 trillion) over the next decade.

That AI-driven power surge lands uncomfortably close to Southeast Asia. Johor, Batam and Greater Jakarta are absorbing hyperscale data centre builds faster than their grids can be cleaned up, a tension that threatens to blow a hole in ASEAN’s climate targets. Storage is the obvious bridge between intermittent solar and round-the-clock server farms, which is why Singapore has started putting money behind its own US$59 million grid fund.

The springboard pitch, and its limits

The report’s more strategic argument concerns China. Mainland firms account for more than half of the global battery applications market, and HKSTP positions Hong Kong as their preferred launchpad overseas. Three of the world’s top ten storage players, CATL, BYD and Gotion High-Tech, have “established a presence” in its ecosystem.

That phrase is doing a lot of work. The report does not say whether these are R&D centres, regional headquarters or registered entities, and the difference matters if the claim is about industrial depth.

The logic of the springboard also deserves scrutiny. As the US and Europe tighten rules on Chinese energy supply chains, HKSTP says mainland companies can lean on Hong Kong’s common law system, international certification and green finance platform to meet compliance requirements. Hong Kong can certainly help with paperwork, standards testing and capital. What it cannot do is change where a cell’s materials come from.

Washington stopped treating Hong Kong separately from mainland China for trade purposes in 2020, and Brussels’ battery rules trace carbon footprints and supply chain due diligence regardless of which city hosts the legal entity. Wong’s description of HKSTP as a “super-connector” is accurate; whether that connection survives the next round of trade tightening is another question.

Four stages, uneven weight

On research, the report points to five of the world’s top 100 universities and park companies such as Luquos Energy, a Chinese University of Hong Kong spin-off that claims to have built the world’s first sulphur-based flow battery. The company says it cuts costs and avoids the overheating fire risk of lithium-ion. Flow batteries are bulky and suited to stationary storage rather than vehicles, so this is a grid and building play, not an EV one.

Also Read: NEU Battery Materials bags US$7.6M to mine lithium from the world’s least-loved battery

Integration is where Hong Kong’s density becomes an asset. More than 60 per cent of the city’s private buildings are over 30 years old and face power capacity limits, making storage that charges off-peak and discharges at peak a practical retrofit. Park companies are also replacing diesel generators on construction sites, and Halo Energy has partnered with XPENG on what it calls the world’s first megawatt-level ultra-fast EV charging station in the city.

Finance is Hong Kong’s strongest card. The city is Asia’s largest arranger of green and sustainable debt, with related issuance topping US$76 billion in 2025. Considering how much of the US$37 billion promised to Southeast Asian climate projects has struggled to reach the ground, a finance-first hub has obvious appeal. HKSTP also signed an MoU this month with the Green Accelerator to link green tech startups with funding.

Recycling closes the loop. Hong Kong expects nearly 6,700 tonnes of retired EV batteries by 2030. Park company GRST has developed a non-toxic, water-soluble binder that it says cuts recycling-stage carbon emissions by up to 80 per cent, and the government opened the city’s first large-scale EV battery recycling facility last year. Southeast Asia faces the same wave sooner than it thinks: EVs are set to make up more than half of Singapore’s vehicle sales this year.

The neighbours are not standing still

Hong Kong is hardly the only city chasing this market. Shenzhen, a short train ride away, already has the factories. Singapore offers its own mix of green finance, rule of law and data centre demand. Indonesia has spent years using its nickel reserves to pull cell makers onshore, and Thailand has drawn Chinese carmakers, BYD among them, to build EV plants on its eastern seaboard. Vietnam’s VinFast, meanwhile, is betting on scale ahead of demand, with a 200,000-car plant for a 33,000-EV market in the Philippines.

Against that backdrop, Hong Kong’s edge is courts, capital and commercialisation rather than cells, the same final-mile-to-market argument it has made across other deep tech sectors.

The number to watch

HKSTP’s ecosystem currently has more than 250 green tech companies, around 100 of them in BES. It wants to lift that to over 160 in the next few years, a 60 per cent increase. The target is measurable, which is to its credit.

Also Read: Hong Kong builds a test track for robots that keep failing outside the lab

The harder test is whether the six companies HKSTP showcased at the summit, and those that follow, sell beyond the Greater Bay Area. Southeast Asia is the natural first market, yet Hong Kong founders have often looked north and west rather than south. If Hong Kong wants to be Asia’s battery broker, it will need to show up where Asia’s next grids are actually being built.

The post Hong Kong has no gigafactories, but it wants a cut of Asia’s US$5T battery boom appeared first on e27.

Indonesia has never lacked halal ambition. What it lacks is money willing to back that ambition.

Two weeks ago, at the 13th Indonesia Sharia Economic Festival (ISEF) in Jakarta, a coalition of regulators, investors and universities launched the Indonesia Halal Innovation and Venture Ecosystem (I-HIVE). The aim is to fix the second problem.

I-HIVE brings together 26 partners. They include Bank Indonesia, the National Committee for Islamic Economy and Finance (KNEKS), financial regulator OJK, planning agency Bappenas and five ministries, alongside investors, banks, industry associations and universities. The pitch is simple: give Indonesian startups building halal products a single route to local and global investors, make them strong at home, and then send them abroad.

Also Read: The VCs writing off Indonesia are making a US$300B mistake

The timing is deliberate. Startup funding in Indonesia fell to US$355.7 million across 91 deals in 2025, down from roughly US$6.9 billion at the 2021 peak, according to DiscoveryShift’s Indonesia Startup Report 2026. Economic think tank Celios estimates that only about 10 per cent of venture capital in the country’s digital economy comes from domestic sources.

That leaves founders dependent on foreign money that has largely gone elsewhere. The market is in what Tracxn described as a structural reset. Ajaib’s US$270 million raise in August was Indonesia’s biggest tech round since 2022. It was also the exception that proves the rule.

Demand is real, and now it is mandatory

The demand case is stronger than the funding case. The State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2025/2026 puts Muslim consumer spending across six real-economy sectors at US$2.6 trillion in 2024 and projects US$3.56 trillion by 2029. The same report ranks Indonesia fourth globally. Bank Indonesia says the country’s halal value chain grew 5.5 per cent year on year in Q2 2026, faster than the wider economy.

Regulation adds urgency. The phase-in period for halal certification of food, beverages and slaughter products made by micro and small businesses ended on 17 October 2026. The scale is enormous. More than 9.6 million products had been certified by 2025, and the government planned 1.35 million free certificates for small businesses this year. That creates a large, slightly panicked customer base for compliance, traceability and supply-chain software. It is the kind of halal integrity problem technologists have pitched solutions for since before the pandemic.

The caveat is that the halal agency has said enforcement will begin with guidance and supervision rather than sweeping raids. Soft enforcement means softer urgency. And Indonesia’s MSMEs are big in number but weak in value. Millions of warung owners needing a certificate does not automatically translate into millions willing to pay for software.

What I-HIVE actually does

I-HIVE organises the ecosystem as a single pipeline. Startups move from venture formation through incubation, halal and investment readiness, and financing and market access, to scale. The pipeline connects eight groups of actors, from Sharia assurance bodies to Islamic social finance institutions.

Also Read: The KoinWorks era: What Indonesia’s SME lending journey has taught the next generation

I-HIVE will also run a sandbox for halal startups, in line with KNEKS’ roadmap, which targets acceleration in 2026 and 2027 and scale by 2030.

“What holds many back is access to investors who understand Sharia-compliant business and will stay with them as they grow,” said Helma Agustiawan, Deputy Director of Islamic Business Incubation at KNEKS.

What I-HIVE does not have, at least publicly, is a pooled fund or committed capital. It is a coordination layer. That is useful in a market where founders bounce between ministries, certifiers and investors. But 26 partners is also a recipe for a very long WhatsApp group. Coalitions of this size tend to succeed or fail on whether one or two members do the heavy lifting.

HASAN.VC wants to be that member

The most obvious candidate is founding collaborator HASAN.VC. Its Labuan-domiciled early-stage fund is backed by angels, family offices and waqf (Islamic endowment) funds across Southeast Asia, the Gulf and North America. The firm has built its thesis around ethical, halal investing and resilient “camel” startups rather than cash-burning unicorns.

It says it has backed 15 Indonesian startups over the past two years, which would make it among the country’s more active investors in a market with only 91 disclosed deals last year. The demo day it co-hosts with KNEKS shows both progress and scale.

In 2024, HASAN.VC was the sole investor behind Rp3.4 billion (about US$200,000) in deals. Deal value rose to Rp21.1 billion in 2025 and about Rp35 billion (around US$2 million) in 2026, a tenfold jump in two years. That figure spans both investment and trade, though, so not all of it is equity. And US$2 million is less than one per cent of a single Ajaib round.

HASAN.VC plans two more Indonesian investments before year end and a larger push in 2027. “What its startups need most is patient capital that shares the risk with them,” said General Partner Umar Munshi.

On stage, Munshi urged Indonesian investors to step up, arguing that local participation gives foreign investors confidence. It is the right message. It is also a hard sell in a year when prosecutions have rattled the venture community. Domestic investors have watched startup failure being treated as a potential crime, and that does not encourage risk-taking.

Gulf money and Dutch expertise

The cross-border corridors may matter more than the domestic pitch. Moria Ventures, a Jakarta-based Islamic investment firm, connects Saudi and Gulf investors with Indonesian companies. After several project-financing deals, it began venture investing six months ago and has made two investments. HASAN.VC has also invested in Moria Fund, Moria Ventures’ fintech business, in a corner of the market where Islamic fintech’s revival is still unproven. Partners backing partners is a sign of commitment. It also means the circle is still small.

“Saudi Arabia has the resources and the Vision 2030 mandate to deploy it,” said Moria Managing Partner Husni M. Bajamal. Gulf interest in Southeast Asia is rising across tourism and trade. But Indonesia competes for that money with Malaysia’s long-established Islamic finance ecosystem, and Gulf investors have historically preferred late-stage deals to seed cheques.

Also Read: The fatwa lag: How AI is overtaking the system designed to govern Islamic finance

From Europe, PUM Netherlands brings 1,200 volunteer experts who advise SMEs in more than 30 countries. PUM was founded in 1978 by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and employers’ federation VNO-NCW.

The real test

I-HIVE gets the diagnosis right. Indonesia’s halal founders sit on top of a growing, now partly mandated market, and they cannot raise money. A shared pipeline, a sandbox and investors who understand Sharia structures are all sensible fixes.

But the bottleneck is capital, not coordination. Next year’s ISEF will show whether I-HIVE has moved real money, and whether any of it came from Indonesian pockets.

The post HASAN.VC, Moria Ventures bet on Gulf capital to rescue Indonesia’s halal startups appeared first on e27.

Singapore’s data centres keep roughly 160 MWh of battery capacity on permanent standby, charged and waiting for a blackout that almost never comes. For an island that imports nearly all its fuel and is scrambling for clean power, that is a lot of expensive hardware doing nothing.

Amplicity, a Singapore-headquartered energy technology startup, wants to change that. The company has closed a US$1.01 million seed round backed by Loyal VC. It says it is in talks with more than 20 prospective customer sites across Asia Pacific and plans to enter Japan in 2027.

Also Read: SG Enviro closes Series A, targets water- and energy-hungry data centres and fabs in SEA

The pitch fits on a napkin: don’t build new batteries, make money from the ones already sitting in the basement.

The idle asset problem

Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems are the insurance policy of the data centre world. When the grid flickers, these batteries keep servers running for the minutes it takes diesel generators to start. The rest of the time, they sit idle.

This is where Amplicitly sees a massive opportunity. Its proprietary technology turns batteries into productive energy assets, from idle backup systems to operational battery energy storage and new installations. This way, data centres, industrial facilities and critical infrastructure operators can reduce electricity costs, generate recurring revenue and decarbonise, while preserving their backup requirements.

Amplicity estimates there is about 160 MWh of such capacity in Singapore’s data centres alone, and roughly 740 MWh across Asia Pacific, before counting factories and industrial sites. The company concedes that not all of it can be used flexibly. Its platform taps only the capacity above each site’s backup reserve. The operator sets the limits, and on-site controllers enforce them even if the internet connection drops.

That last detail is worth noting. The biggest objection from data centre operators, whose contracts are built around near-perfect uptime, is that anyone tinkering with the backup could cause the very outage it exists to prevent.

“The next energy storage opportunity is not just about building more batteries. We need to look at the resources we already have,” said co-founder and CEO Stéphane Leyo.

Where the money comes from

Most of the value, Amplicity says, comes from peak shaving. The batteries discharge during demand spikes, which is when large users pay a premium. Wholesale electricity market revenue is added on top.

The company’s own modelling suggests that a SGD500,000 (about US$388,000) battery at a Singapore data centre could deliver roughly SGD256,000 (US$198,000) in value a year. That is a striking return. On paper, the hardware would pay for itself in under two years. But it is a model, not a track record. Amplicity has not disclosed live deployments, megawatt-hours under management or signed customers. Being “engaged with” 20 sites is a pipeline, not a book of business.

There are technical questions too. UPS batteries were specified to sit fully charged, not to cycle every day. More frequent charging and discharging speeds up wear, and operators will want to know how that affects vendor warranties and replacement schedules. Amplicity’s Battery Value Assessment estimates what a site’s batteries could be worth before the operator commits. It will need to answer the wear question honestly to win over cautious facilities managers.

Also Read: Thirty climate tech startups in Southeast Asia that would rather build than pledge

Beyond existing backups, Amplicity also optimises operational battery energy storage systems. Where the economics justify it, it installs new ones with financing.

“By combining site-specific optimisation with electricity market opportunities, we can create economic value for businesses while supporting a more flexible energy system,” said co-founder and COO Gabriel Schiano.

Why the timing works

Timing is the startup’s strongest card. Data centres already consume about 7 per cent of Singapore’s electricity. The country has more than 1.6 GW of data centre capacity and plans at least 300 MW more, even as AI workloads push facilities to their power limits. About 95 per cent of its electricity still comes from natural gas, and clean power imports from its neighbours remain years away.

The state is already putting money into grid resilience. Distributed batteries at existing sites could help the grid absorb more intermittent renewables without new infrastructure. Loyal VC founding partner Michael Kosic called it “a capital-light way to support the energy transition.”

Crowded at home, tougher abroad

Amplicity is not alone in eyeing Singapore’s batteries. Blue Whale Energy raised US$2 million last year to build what it calls Singapore’s first battery-based virtual power plant. It deploys its own sodium-ion packs for commercial and industrial customers and holds an Energy Market Authority wholesale electricity licence. That is the opposite philosophy to Amplicity’s: one company owns the hardware, the other works someone else’s harder. The press release does not say whether Amplicity holds its own market licence or works through a partner.

Globally, power management giant Eaton has for years marketed grid-interactive UPS systems that let data centres sell services back to European grids. US-listed Stem uses software to optimise commercial storage fleets.

Amplicity’s edge is its model of working with existing equipment and requiring no new capital spending. That makes it easier to sell, because operators do not need a capital budget approved. The flip side is that the startup depends on clients trusting an outsider with their most mission-critical equipment. Japan, with its entrenched utilities and famously conservative procurement culture, will test that trust harder still.

Pedigree versus proof

Amplicity began at ENGIE Factory, the incubator of French energy group ENGIE, which was later acquired by Pacific Channel. It has been supported by SMU BIG, NUS Deep SAGE and Swinburne University’s Climate 4.0 Hub. It won the Pioneers in Sustainability Award at the France-Singapore Business Awards 2026 and is a finalist at this year’s AustCham Singapore Business Awards.

Also Read: Hong Kong has no gigafactories, but it wants a cut of Asia’s US$5T battery boom

Awards and incubator credentials open doors. Megawatt-hours under contract keep them open. Amplicity has a US$1 million cheque in a sector where climate tech capital is pooling in fewer hands, so it has little time to turn spreadsheet returns into batteries that earn.

The post Amplicity raises US$1M to put Singapore’s sleeping data centre batteries to work appeared first on e27.

Picture a leadership meeting that goes like this.

The air conditioner in the corner of the 22nd-floor boardroom had a faint, high-pitched metallic whine. Outside the glass, the heat off Robinson Road shimmered against the asphalt, but inside, the air was cold enough to raise goosebumps.

David, the CEO, leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. Between his elbows sat three sheets of printed financial models, untouched.

“Marcus,” David said, his voice flat. “Who signed off on this?”

Marcus didn’t look up immediately. His right hand stayed glued to his mouse, fingers twitching as he clicked between browser tabs. On the 85-inch monitor on the wall, the dashboard was a sea of crimson. Unit economics had turned upside down in forty-eight hours. Customer acquisition costs in Jakarta had spiked 400 percent after an aggressive, offline pricing maneuver by an unlisted domestic incumbent that appeared nowhere in regional databases.

“We all did,” Marcus muttered, his eyes still fixed on the glass screen. “The model tested nine thousand market variables. It gave Pathway B an eighty-four percent confidence interval. We stress-tested the regulatory scenario. Priya’s inputs were in there. David, you ran the runway constraints yourself.”

David didn’t answer. He just looked at Marcus.

And that was the moment the tension in the room turned suffocating.

It wasn’t the panic of losing money. Founders lose money every day. It was the sickening realization of who was sitting across the table: six brilliant, highly compensated executives who suddenly looked like terrified schoolboys waiting for a hall monitor to tell them what to do.

Also Read: Muggles struggle, wizards juggle: What happens when everyone gets an AI familiar

Six months earlier, in that exact same room, they had toasted this decision with lukewarm coffee.

There had been no raised voices. No sharp words. When Priya hesitated on whether informal vendor networks in Indonesia would follow the synthetic pricing curves, Marcus hadn’t leaned into her doubt to explore it. Instead, he simply tapped his keys: “I just ran Priya’s hesitation through the reasoning model. It discounted our baseline by twelve percent and Pathway B still beats Pathway A on every capital efficiency metric.”

Priya had swallowed her objection. The tension had vanished before it could breathe. The room had let out a collective, relieved exhale. The friction of having to look a peer in the eye and say, “I don’t care what the math says, my gut tells me this will get us killed” had been neatly, scientifically eradicated.

They thought they had achieved friction-free clarity.

Now, staring at the wreckage, the brutal reveal hit everyone in the room: They hadn’t bought strategic certainty. They had bought an organisational alibi.

The system had not deceived them. The algorithm had done precisely what it was designed to do: calculate probability based on historic distributions and low-variance precedent. The betrayal had not come from the silicon; it had come from the humans. They had subconsciously used the machine’s polished defensibility to excuse themselves from the agony of genuine courage.

Nobody had fought for Pathway B. Nobody had sworn an oath to it. They had simply taken refuge inside a consensus so mathematically tidy that if everything went to hell, nobody’s neck would be on the chopping block.

Behavioural scientists call this automation bias and accountability diffusion—the quiet sedative that makes smart leaders surrender their skeptical edge the moment an automated system presents an elegant narrative. It is what researchers from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton documented when studying elite professionals using generative models: when the problem reaches the edge of uncharted terrain, humans fall asleep at the wheel.

And as a sweeping meta-analysis across over one hundred experiments published in the Academy of Management Perspectives proved, human-AI teams routinely fail to outperform individuals working alone—not because the technology lacks power, but because humans abandon the friction required to challenge it.

When AI mediates strategic consensus, governance dies. As Harvard Business Review points out, consensus models collapse under the weight of AI synthesis. The moment responsibility is spread across a prompt and an algorithm, everyone is an observer, and no one is an owner.

Also Read: How we use AI to triage inbound B2B leads without blasting everyone the same way

Every competitor in your market has access to the exact same reasoning tools and data pipelines you do. If your executive sessions only exist to rubber-stamp the lowest-variance algorithmic path, your team will drown in polite, defensible mediocrity.

If you lead a company today, you must erect three non-negotiable boundaries:

• First, eliminate composite consensus. An algorithm can sketch the battlefield, but it cannot take the hill. Before signing off on any high-stakes bet, outlaw shared ownership. Force one executive to step out from behind the group, take the pen, and sign their name alone on the charter. If the plan ruptures, they are forbidden from citing the prompt or the confidence interval. Authorship must carry a pulse.
• Second, reintroduce the friction by turning the system into an enemy. When your executive offsite reaches effortless alignment on an AI-synthesised roadmap in under an hour, refuse to adjourn. Feed the plan back into the model with a direct command: “Act as our most aggressive competitor and our most cynical regulator. Tell us why this plan is intellectually cowardly, and highlight the assumptions we are accepting solely because they spare us from arguing.” Force the real human tension back into the room.

Most of all, understand the sovereign threshold. A neural net can model your burn rate, project user churn, and draft emergency scenarios. But it will never look an engineer in the face on a Friday afternoon when payroll is missed and say, “This was my decision, and I will fix it.”

True leadership does not exist within the parameters of the training data. It begins at the exact moment the data runs out.

The next time your leadership team gathers around a conference table with an airtight, AI-assisted proposal, don’t look at the slides. Look at the person championing the initiative.

Look them in the eye and ask: If this breaks tomorrow, and every algorithmic model is revealed to be dead wrong—are you prepared to stand in front of this company and take full, solitary custody of the wreckage?

If their hands shake, or if their eyes dart toward their screen before they answer, shut down the meeting. You do not have a strategy. You just have a very expensive excuse.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post The sovereign threshold: Why airtight AI decisions are paralysing executive teams appeared first on e27.

I’m the founder of MyStarChain, which runs blockchain-based public voting for awards, pageants and competitions through the MyStarPick platform.

In August my team ran the public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant. When the count closed, nobody asked us to prove it. The organiser did not need to, the contestants did not need to, and the fans did not need to, because every single vote already sat on a public ledger where anyone could check it. That is a strange feeling in this industry, and it is the reason I am writing this.

Public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant, August 2026. 7,855 fans cast 47,859 votes, every one of them recorded on a public blockchain.

Across the competitions we have supported since our founding, about 180,000 fans have cast more than 2.8 million votes through our platform. We have not had a single tampering incident, and that is not because we are unusually careful. It is because the system is built so that the operator, including us, cannot touch the count.

Why trust collapsed

Anyone who works in Korean entertainment remembers November 2019, when the producers of Mnet’s Produce 101 series, the country’s most popular idol audition franchise, were arrested for rigging the results. The court later found that rankings had been predetermined across all four seasons, and the lead producer was sentenced to two years in prison. Fans had paid for every text-message vote. The groups formed by those votes were eventually disbanded.

Also Read: How we use AI to triage inbound B2B leads without blasting everyone the same way

Korea was not an exception. It was an early warning. Across the world, public votes for awards, talent shows, music charts and brand campaigns now face the same three threats: bot and macro voting that inflates a favourite overnight, organisers who can quietly adjust a count nobody can audit, and sponsors who no longer believe the numbers they paid for. Major broadcasters and award bodies have responded by tightening vote limits, adding fraud detection and rewriting their rules, which tells you how serious the problem has become. Yet every one of those fixes still asks the audience to trust the organiser. That is the part that is broken.

A popularity award that fans believe was bought or botted is worth less than no award at all.

What a verifiable vote actually looks like

The fix is not more moderators or a better spreadsheet. The fix is removing the operator from the trust equation. When every vote is recorded as a token transfer on a public blockchain rather than in a database someone controls, fans can verify their own votes. An organiser can hand a journalist a link instead of a statement. If a result is challenged, the evidence is already public.

This is what we did for Miss Korea, and it is what we did in Malaysia for the PC.com Readers’ Choice Awards 2026, the country’s largest IT awards, where consumers chose the technology brands of the year. We ran the vote for the BusinessToday Industry Choice Awards 2026 on the same infrastructure. This autumn we brought it to the audience vote of an international film festival, where the public, not the jury, decided which films to honour. We are also running the public vote for Supermodel International 2026 in Thailand, where fans can pay in their own currency.

Also Read: Inside Singapore’s AI push: Lighthouses, rice importers and robot labs

The part nobody expected: It is also better data

Here is what we learned only after running dozens of these votes. A verified vote is not just a fairer vote. It is the most honest signal a brand can get about who its future customers are.

A survey asks a panel what they might do. A fan vote records what an identified person actually did, at a moment they cared about, for a brand or a person they chose. That is why we are now running a proof of concept with a global brand in which the same verified participants who voted are issued a redemption code, and we track whether they walk into a store and use it. The organiser gets a trustworthy result. The brand gets a line from participation to purchase, on people who chose to be identified, rather than on an inferred lookalike audience.

When every authenticated vote becomes a node in a graph of real fan relationships, it becomes possible to see which audiences cluster together, who actually influences whom, and which cultural trends are forming before they show up in sales. None of it works unless the underlying vote is trustworthy, which is why we spent years on the boring part first.

What I would ask organisers to do

If you run an award, a festival, a talent competition or a brand campaign with a public vote, ask your vendor two questions. Can a fan independently verify that their vote was counted? And if a result is disputed, can you publish the evidence rather than a statement? If the answer to either is no, you are asking your audience to trust you, and 2019 taught this industry how that ends.

The fan vote does not need to be abandoned. It needs to be made verifiable, and then it becomes one of the most valuable assets an organiser has.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post The fan vote is broken: Here is what it takes to make people trust it again appeared first on e27.

Most small businesses in Southeast Asia already run on WhatsApp. Orders arrive there, suppliers send invoices there, staff send photos of receipts there. So when owners hear “AI”, the first idea is usually a chatbot that answers customers faster.

After building AI systems for food, professional services and property businesses in Indonesia and Singapore, I think that idea points at the wrong problem. Answering is rarely what eats a team’s day. What eats it is everything that has to happen after the answer: the order that has to be written down, the payment that has to be matched, the delivery that has to be booked, the receipt that has to end up in the books.

Here is what we have learned about making AI useful for an SME, rather than impressive in a demo.

Start with one workflow, not “AI for the business”

The projects that work start narrow: one recurring job that someone does every day by hand. At Rosalie Cheese, a food business selling through WhatsApp, that job was order admin — reading chats, confirming orders, arranging payment and delivery. It took the team more than four hours a day. Once an agent handled that flow, with the team reviewing instead of typing, it took about 20 minutes.

The narrow start matters because it gives you a number you can check. “We use AI now” is not a result. “Order admin went from four hours to 20 minutes” is.

The bottleneck is the handoff, not the answer

At a professional-services firm we work with, reconciliation took a team of four more than 20 hours a week. None of that time was spent on hard accounting judgement. It was spent moving information: from a bank statement to a spreadsheet, from a receipt to a ledger, from one person to the next.

When those handoffs run on their own and only the real exceptions reach a person, the same work takes under 30 minutes a week. The accountants did not get faster at accounting. They stopped being the copy-paste layer between systems.

Also Read: Gen Z is bringing its own AI to work. Singapore’s SMEs need rules, not bans

Numbers should come from code, not from a model

A language model is very good at reading a messy photo of a receipt or a voice note from a supplier. It should not be the thing that decides what a total is. In the systems we build, the AI reads and interprets, but figures and actions follow fixed, checkable logic. If the books say a number, there is a rule you can point to that produced it.

This is the difference between a tool a finance lead will trust and one they will quietly double-check forever — which means no time saved at all.

Anything involving money or a customer waits for a human

The fastest way to lose an owner’s trust is an AI that sends the wrong thing to a customer or pays the wrong invoice. So consequential actions wait for approval. In practice that approval is one tap in the same WhatsApp thread, and it keeps the owner in control while removing the typing around the decision.

Go live in weeks, inside the tools the team already uses

SMEs do not have time for a six-month transformation programme, and they do not want another dashboard to log in to. A first workflow should be live in about a week, running in WhatsApp, the spreadsheet and the accounting software the team already has. If the new system needs its own training course, it will not be used.

Also Read: Singapore SMEs buy back time with AI, but messy data keeps pilots stuck

What to ask before you buy

If you are an SME owner looking at AI, three questions cut through most of the noise:

• Which single, recurring job will this take off my team, and how many hours does that job take today?
• When the AI is unsure or wrong, what happens, and who approves anything involving money or customers?
• Does it work inside the tools we already use, or does it add a new one?

The answers will tell you more than any demo. The goal is not to have AI. The goal is to get your team’s evenings back.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post Your SME doesn’t need a chatbot. It needs the work after the chat done appeared first on e27.

For years, Southeast Asia’s crypto regulators have asked exchanges the same set of questions. Where is your licence? Where is your local entity? Where are your cold wallets, and whose name is on them?

On October 29, North Korea answered with a question of its own: whose laptop is this?

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, says an attacker compromised a laptop belonging to a single DevOps engineer. From there, the intruder reached a “service container” and pushed through unauthorised withdrawals.

Also Read: Crypto’s new threat is not a hack, but a knock at the door

The estimated impact is about US$6.3 billion, roughly four times the US$1.5 billion Bybit heist of February 2025 that held the previous record. About US$3 billion has been frozen so far.

TRM Labs and Chainalysis both point to North Korea. Chainalysis names TraderTraitor, the state-backed cluster linked to Bybit.

Binance says it has found no evidence that wallet private keys leaked. That line is meant to reassure. It should do the opposite. The attacker never needed the keys. They did not crack the safe; they borrowed the hand that operates it.

Ring-fencing worked. It just wasn’t enough

Thailand offers the cleanest test case. Binance TH is run by Gulf Binance, a joint venture between an affiliate of Gulf Energy Development and the Binance group. It holds Thai SEC licences and says it keeps its cold wallets separate from the global exchange’s, inside its own legal entity.

That is precisely the architecture regulators across the region have demanded since the FTX collapse. On its own terms, it seems to have held: Gulf Binance says Thai customers’ assets are safe.

And yet, within hours, Binance TH suspended crypto deposits and withdrawals for a security check. Thai users whose assets were never touched still could not move them.

Ring-fencing protected the balance sheet. It did not protect access, confidence, or the shared engineers, code and processes that run through a global group whatever the cap table says. A licence tells you where the money sits. It says nothing about who can move it.

Also Read: Bybit invests US$8M in Hata to crack Malaysia’s regulated crypto market

Indonesia should be asking the same question. Binance has been Tokocrypto’s majority shareholder from the start, by co-founder Changpeng Zhao’s own account. How tightly local plumbing is tied to the parent’s is something only supervisors with real access can test, and this week they should.

The region is both the market and the hunting ground

Why should this land harder here than in London or New York? Chainalysis’s 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index ranks Vietnam fourth in the world, Indonesia seventh and the Philippines ninth. These are retail-heavy markets, where crypto doubles as a remittance rail, a gaming currency and a savings account.

Unlike bank deposits, funds held on an exchange carry no automatic insurance. Any refund is at the exchange’s discretion. Binance has promised to cover every loss from its SAFU fund and company money, and it can: it held about US$144 billion in assets before the attack, according to DefiLlama. A mid-sized exchange in Jakarta, Manila or Ho Chi Minh City hit by the same playbook could not.

And it is a playbook, not a freak event. Southeast Asia has already read its opening chapter. In 2022, the Ronin Network behind Axie Infinity, built by Vietnam-founded Sky Mavis and beloved by Filipino play-to-earn gamers, lost US$620 million. The way in was an employee who opened a fake job-offer PDF.

Since then, the trick has been polished. Researchers at Wiz, Unit 42 and Microsoft describe the same pattern: a “recruiter” on LinkedIn, an attractive role, a coding test hosted on GitHub, and malware riding in on a developer’s ambition. Bybit fell to a version of it. Now, it appears, so has Binance.

That makes the region a target twice over. It is home to millions of retail holders. It is also one of the world’s deepest pools of remote engineers, many working in crypto and fintech, and many open to exactly the kind of well-paid offshore role North Korea loves to advertise.

The rescue came from private kill switches

Look at who limited the damage. It was not a regulator or a court. Zhao thanked Tether for freezing about US$971 million and Circle for about US$823 million of stolen stablecoins.

Also Read: Southeast Asia can’t simply license its way to stablecoin sovereignty

In the biggest crypto heist on record, the most effective police force was two private companies that can switch tokens off. That is welcome this week. It is an uncomfortable fact every other week, because no regulator in Bangkok, Jakarta or Manila decides when those switches get flipped.

Communication was its own weak spot. AFP noted that Binance’s posts on X swung between insisting user funds were “completely safe” and promising to “cover all losses”. In markets where retail investors learn about losses from Telegram groups before official notices, mixed messages are a security risk in their own right.

License the people, not just the wallets

So what should change? First, regulators should stop treating custody location as the finish line. Licensing reviews need harder questions: who can trigger withdrawals, from which devices, with how many independent approvals, and how fast can a transfer be stopped?

Second, red-team tests should simulate a phished developer, not just a stolen key. Running untrusted third-party code on machines that touch production should be a reportable failure, not a bad habit.

Third, local subsidiaries should prove they can keep honouring withdrawals when the parent freezes. Ring-fencing that protects assets but not access is half a promise.

Fourth, incident disclosure should come within hours, in local languages, with one consistent message.

Founders building exchanges, wallets and fintech rails have homework too. Treat hiring channels as attack surface. Treat your DevOps team’s laptops as the vault door, because that is what they now are.

Also Read: AI agents broke into 100 firms for pocket change. SEA’s online shops fit the target profile

Binance will very likely survive this. Analysts at Fundstrat see no meaningful solvency risk. A smaller Southeast Asian platform would not be so lucky.

The lesson is not that crypto is doomed. It is that the region’s rulebook was written for the 2022 problem: an exchange quietly spending its customers’ money. The 2026 problem is a state-backed hacking unit that needs only one engineer to open one file.

The vault was in the right country. The key was in someone’s backpack.

The post North Korea’s hiring scam just cost Binance US$6.3B. SEA’s engineers are on the shortlist appeared first on e27.

Bitcoin fell 4.87 per cent to US$77,037.20 in 24 hours and underperformed a broadly weaker crypto sector. A confirmed security incident at Binance on October 29 triggered the drop. That shock arrived against a 65 per cent correlation with the S&P 500. Macro risk aversion had already set a defensive tone. The result was a fear-driven repricing that hit the largest digital asset harder than its peers and exposed how quickly confidence drains when the system’s central counterparty looks vulnerable.

The breach involved hot wallets. Arkham, Chainalysis, and TRM Labs estimate total outflows ranging from US$2 billion up to US$6 billion. The higher figure would make it the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. Traders sold before the exchange provided full details. That response was rational because the platform anchors a huge share of global crypto liquidity.

Changpeng Zhao and co-founder Yi He moved quickly to reassure users. Yi He pledged that the company would cover all hacking losses using its capital margins and its Secure Asset Fund for Users, known as SAFU. Current executives echoed the message that customer funds were safe. Those statements matter. They landed in a market already inclined to distrust reassuring words until on-chain evidence backs them up. Trust in an exchange rests on proof, not press releases, and volatility lives in the gap between the two.

Containment has moved fast. Major crypto entities froze roughly US$3 billion in stolen assets. Tether froze US$1.57 billion. Circle froze more than US$800 million. Ripple froze US$200 million. World Liberty Financial contributed additional assets. That coordination is a genuine bright spot and shows the industry’s emergency-response machinery can act when the stakes are high. Binance suspended all deposits and withdrawals while its team conducts security checks.

Binance paused trading on the Binance Alpha platform as a precaution. Binance US confirmed it remained entirely unaffected. That detail matters for users in the United States and does little to calm global trading in the immediate term. The exchange said withdrawal access will restore automatically once it fully deploys security patches. Until that happens, uncertainty itself becomes a force that moves prices. Frozen funds reduce the final damage, but they do not restore normal deposit and withdrawal flow.

Also Read: Bitcoin rebounds to US$81,000 but faces weakest October in 6 years

The secondary driver was mechanical and brutal. The initial slide triggered a cascade of leveraged long liquidations totalling more than US$629 million in one hour. More than 96 per cent of those positions were bullish long bets. That is the signature of an over-leveraged market catching a sudden shock. When long positions close under pressure, selling feeds on itself, pushing prices lower and triggering more liquidations in a feedback loop that has nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with positioning.

Binance’s native token BNB tumbled more than seven per cent, underperforming Bitcoin and underscoring how exchange-specific risk radiates outward. The broader crypto sector weakened. Bitcoin’s underperformance relative to that weaker sector points to a specific loss of confidence rather than a uniform risk-off move. The forced selling did not reflect a fresh judgement about long-term value. It reflected a sudden scramble for exits in a crowded trade.

The 65 per cent correlation with the S&P 500 ties this episode to the wider financial system. Crypto does not trade in isolation. A macro-driven selloff in risk assets creates a backdrop where investors already want to reduce exposure, and the Binance shock accelerated that process.

When equities weaken and volatility rises, Bitcoin increasingly trades like a high-beta risk asset rather than an uncorrelated hedge. Correlation doesn’t explain the trigger. It explains why the decline gained traction so quickly. A market already leaning defensive needs little push to turn speculation into a rout. The exchange scare supplied the push, and the macro backdrop supplied the slope.

Also Read: The Fed decides today: Here are the 2 levels every Bitcoin trader should watch

Technically, the picture is stretched but not without structure. Bitcoin’s 14-day relative strength index sits at 24.32, firmly in oversold territory and suggesting immediate selling pressure may be nearing exhaustion. Price is testing a critical support band between US$76,264 and US$76,476. If that zone holds and Binance provides a verified update that contains the incident, a relief bounce toward the 50-day exponential moving average near US$80,789 becomes plausible.

The near-term bias remains bearish until price reclaims the US$79,282 level, which represents the 50 per cent Fibonacci retracement. A decisive break below US$76,264 support would open the path to the next major demand zone near US$75,800. That level aligns with the short-term holder cost basis and would likely intensify pain for recent buyers.

My view is that this episode is less about the breach itself and more about the conditions that let one security failure trigger a US$629 million liquidation cascade in one hour. The market entered this shock with too much long-side leverage and too little margin for error. That is a structural vulnerability, not an isolated event. The industry’s ability to freeze roughly US$3 billion in stolen assets is impressive and genuinely reduces the final damage. It does not change the fact that hot-wallet concentration remains a systemic risk.

Binance’s pledge to cover losses through SAFU and capital margins is the right response. The size of that fund relative to the upper end of the outflow estimates means the public will want more than assurances. It will want a full accounting, independent verification, and a clear timeline for restoring withdrawal access. Until then, every speculative claim will carry outsized weight.

The practical takeaway for anyone watching this situation is to treat speculation and phishing messages as a source of risk rather than a signal. Scams offering refunds or wallet verification are already capitalising on the chaos. Anyone who acts on those messages risks compounding a trading loss with a personal security breach.

The only reliable sources are Binance’s official X account and announcements on its official website. Withdrawal capabilities will return once security patches are fully deployed. That moment will be a more meaningful test of confidence than any intraday bounce. For now, the near-term outlook remains under bearish pressure.

The key question is whether Bitcoin can defend the US$76,264 to US$76,476 support zone following Binance’s official update, or whether a break lower takes price toward US$75,800. The answer will depend less on charts and more on whether the exchange can replace fear with verified facts.

—

The post If Binance says user funds are safe, why did Bitcoin still fall to US$77,037.20? appeared first on e27.

Joel Neoh has spent two decades selling things to adults: group-buying deals at Groupon, cashback at Fave, DNA kits and supplements at Prenetics. His new job asks him to build a business on a platform where a large slice of the audience still needs a parent’s permission to buy anything.

Roblox has appointed the Malaysian serial founder as Managing Director for Southeast Asia and Oceania, making him its senior-most business lead across the two regions. Neoh, who joined in October, will run regional strategy, court brands and local businesses, and try to grow a creator ecosystem that does more than just play.

Also Read: Beyond play-to-earn: 14 Southeast Asian gaming and sports-tech startups still in the game

On paper, it is a growth hire. Read the fine print, and it looks just as much like a trust hire.

The safety question comes first

Neoh’s own framing is unusually restrained for a newly minted regional chief. In an interview with Marketing-Interactive, he said his first priority was simply to “listen, learn and build relationships” with creators, developers, educators, brands and, notably, policymakers.

That last group matters. Indonesia’s Government Regulation No. 17/2025, known as PP Tunas, has been in force since March 28, 2026, and Roblox is the one gaming platform named among the services it covers. In April, the communications ministry said Roblox’s feature changes fell short of the country’s child protection standards, before confirming compliance at the end of that month.

Officials have also kept up pressure for Roblox to open a local office in Indonesia. Across the Strait, Roblox pledged stronger safeguards in Malaysia following government scrutiny and a serious incident involving children in Johor, and while gaming platforms sit outside Malaysia’s current under-16 social media rules, the government has said they could be reviewed if safety complaints rise.

Neoh acknowledged that Roblox’s young community brings “both an incredible opportunity and a responsibility”. For a platform whose biggest regional markets are writing rules with it squarely in mind, that responsibility is not a talking point. It is the licence to operate. The wider debate on what comes after outright social media bans suggests regulators are only getting started.

From player base to creator hub

Neoh’s longer-term pitch is that SEA should be where Roblox experiences are made, not merely consumed. AI tools that cut the cost of building games, he argues, could let developers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia ship experiences to global audiences, a thesis that echoes the broader rise of AI-enabled gaming entrepreneurs.

The logic holds. In SEA, gaming is less a channel than the entire playing field, and Indonesia in particular has a deep bench of young, digitally native players. But turning players into paid creators is a much harder trick. Creator economies tend to reward a handful of hit studios disproportionately, and Neoh will need to show that local developers can earn real money, not just applause.

He insists success “isn’t just about growing the number of users”. Fair enough, though Roblox’s shareholders will still be counting them.

Brands, but carefully

The commercial piece is where Neoh’s Groupon and Fave DNA shows. He sees an opening for marketers who want to reach younger audiences beyond ads and social feeds, through immersive brand experiences, virtual goods and collaborations with local creators. The goal, he says, is to help brands move from advertising at communities to “creating experiences with communities”.

Early movers already exist. Indonesian children’s magazine Bobo brought its IP onto Roblox with Volare Advertising Network. Singapore’s Esplanade built “Beatsverse” around its Baybeats festival, featuring music from more than 20 local artists. Malaysian QSR chain Marrybrown is testing links between gameplay, its loyalty programme and physical outlets via its MB App.

That Marrybrown experiment is the most Fave-like idea on the list: online engagement converted into offline footfall. It is also the one that needs the most care. Neoh himself conceded that everything must be “thoughtful, age-appropriate”. Fast-food rewards pitched to a young audience are exactly what child-protection advocates watch for. The argument that the creator economy is distribution, not marketing will be stress-tested here.

The rivals are not sitting still

Roblox is hardly alone in chasing SEA’s young gamers and creators. Sea’s Garena, whose Free Fire remains a staple across the region, is weaving AI deeper into its gaming arm. Microsoft’s Minecraft and Epic Games’ Fortnite, with its creator toolset, compete globally for the same user-generated content talent, while Naver’s Zepeto has long courted Asian teens with avatar-led social spaces. For brands, the platform choice increasingly comes down to where young users already spend their social time.

Why Neoh, why now

Neoh’s CV reads like a map of SEA’s consumer internet over the past 15 years. He co-founded SAYS.com in 2010, later acquired by Catcha Group, then built GroupsMore, which merged into Groupon, where he led Asia Pacific operations across a dozen markets until 2015. He went on to found Fave, which reached more than 50 cities and over 10 million users before Pine Labs, which has since listed publicly, acquired it in 2021.

Also Read: Creators, not impressions, will decide the next growth wave in gaming

He has also backed more than 50 startups, co-founded early-stage fund First Move and mentored at Endeavor. Most recently, he spent two years as managing director and chief consumer officer at Prenetics, building consumer health brands IM8 and CircleDNA.

Zhen Fang, Roblox’s VP of international, said the company would keep investing in regional teams, creators and partners, citing Neoh’s entrepreneurial record and local connections. The hire follows last year’s appointment of former Tinder APAC communications chief Papri Dev as Roblox’s head of communications for Asia Pacific.

The pattern is hard to miss. Roblox is staffing up for a region where reputation and regulation will shape growth as much as product does. Neoh’s network across founders, investors and policymakers may prove more valuable than his dealmaking playbook.

The real test is whether a founder who made his name getting people to spend can build a business where, for once, restraint is the product.

The post Roblox hands Fave founder Joel Neoh the keys to SEA. His first job isn’t growth, it’s trust appeared first on e27.